If RT says the sky is blue are you going to say that’s just Russian propaganda as well? Because the fact that this is happening is about as obvious as the previously stated fact, regardless who is saying it.

According to Twitter he has ties to Azov and was actively engaged in attempting to recruit and smuggle mercenaries from Central Asia to fight in Ukraine, and proposed doing the same for Taiwan. Unhinged psycho. Too bad these wannabe assassins are such rabid turbolibs…

Pop science journalism is also frequently sensationalist garbage. In my own field where i am familiar with the subject matter i’d say they have a hit rate of maybe 50% where they actually write something good albeit boring for the average reader, and that’s mostly because the people writing have a real background in science. In other fields where the journalists are essentially amateur enthusiasts the ratio of decent pieces to garbage is even worse.

He’s not “lukewarm” or “left wing” anything, as this thread makes very clear he’s a deranged Zionist freak. He isn’t both-siding, he actively supports the genocide and advocates for brainwashing children into Zionism.

It’s very expensive to be poor.

Yeah, though i’m expecting major sabotage efforts by the usual three letter agencies of the US and UK in regards to that project. Wouldn’t even put it past NASA to get involved in trying to make sure that the mission fails.

Assuming this is true

Yes, assuming this is not some stunt to try and make Biden look like he also survived a near death experience like Trump, which i wouldn’t put past the DNC to think they have to do to even the playing field now.

First Trump dodges a bullet by a couple of centimeters and then the universe smites Biden with the plague? Can you imagine how insufferable evangelicals will become if that happens?

Unless his base become so overconfident in their victory that they don’t even bother to go out and vote. I am not excluding any possibility at the moment, but it certainly seems like the odds are in his favor. And a lot can happen between now and election day.

And the US clown show kicks into overdrive. The trapeze artists are flying doing all sorts of backflips while the jugglers are on a unicycle riding the high wire. It’s going to be an entertaining rest of the year if nothing else.

And yet somehow people still think that the US could wage a protracted war against China…

NATO can’t even keep up with Russia which is minuscule compared to China in industrial terms.

Are you sure we’re talking about the same Labour party? Cause the Labour party i know is Blairite through and through. It was also under Labour that Britain started to wage ruthless and bloody military campaigns post WW2 in an attempt to cling to its colonial empire, for instance in Malaya. These are their genes, that is their fundamental character: imperialism and neoliberalism. Corbyn was an outlier, a short-lived exception.

The US is absolutely cooked:

Who in Washington doesn’t?

Maybe. Though you could make the same argument for big platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity. But because they are so big and that is where most people are, it’s hard to make a switch.

At the end of the day you still run into the problem of monopolies. Not just of the platforms themselves but more importantly of the financial institutions that they rely on. Who processes the transactions? As long as the payments still go through the US dominated financial system any platform will be vulnerable to political pressure to have their access to said financial systems cut off if they do not comply.

The only real way to escape is to build structures outside of the West’s financial transaction architecture, for platforms to adopt payment systems that go through the kinds of alternatives that Russia and China are trying to build at the moment.

That’s almost definitely not happening.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I don’t know about Substack but afaik Patreon has deplatformed people for political reasons before, including anti-imperialists.

So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators’ revenues if those were to leave over political differences.

This is a very naive argument, in a way akin to the liberal notion that the market regulates itself because if corporations behave contrary to what people want they will lose money.

The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality. Oftentimes political pressure placed on platforms by governments, media and powerful lobbying groups is stronger than the economic incentives to resist that pressure.

I don’t know where you ever got that idea from. They are bigger than ever, at least on paper. Admittedly they have lost a significant part of their most trained and motivated pre-war core by now, but a lot are still around and formally they have only gotten bigger because the Kiev regime keeps sending the best recruits and best equipment to Azov and the various other Nazi units (some of which, like Kraken, are made up of pure psychopaths…), because these units have the political connections to the Right Sector and the other Banderite political groupings that are really in charge of Ukraine.

So anything that goes to the Ukrainian military eventually ends up in their hands if it’s any good. And they’ve become more and more legitimized and more integral to the Ukrainian army as their ideology has been normalized in the ranks of the professional military and widely adopted by a large segment of the population. Also, a whole bunch of them got captured at Azovstal in Mariupol but were exchanged over time and most of them immediately went back to fighting. Really dumb move. The Russians know who these people are and won’t be taking them prisoner a second time.

But despite their reputation they’re really kind of shitty fighters. Like the IOF they’re good at terrorizing civilians, not so good at fighting wars. Mostly they fulfil the role of blocking detachments to keep the unwillingly mobilized in line and shoot anyone who tries to run or surrender. Which is ironic because there have been a bunch of instances when they themselves outright ran instead of following orders when they were sent in as a last resort, noticed the situation was FUBAR, and they just fucked off and left the poorly trained conscripts to die just to delay the Russians for a bit.

I still think the US debt is meaningless. Don’t see why they would need to do austerity regardless how big the debt is. If they do implement austerity, which they may at some point, it won’t be because of the debt but because they have decided it is in their advantage to do so. Austerity is a means of disciplining the working class. It’s for beating us into submission so we come begging to capital for scraps.

Is it possible we’re just being outcompeted

The answer appears to be a resounding yes, even according to western reporters:

“I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked”

This is just the pigs saying “we’ll gladly do it but you need to give us a better pretext first”.